The other day I got an email that asked, and I quote, “I was wondering what your thoughts are on revolutionary poetry after poets like Dalton, Castillo, and Cardenal. I think Jack Hirshman and Curbstone do a superb job of brining the best "political" poetry into English.” Well, it’s Hirschman, not Hirshman, and I’ve known Jack I guess for some 30 years, a generous & troubled soul just like the rest of us. I knew Jack first as a translator from the Russian and as somebody who had been a supportive teacher to Clayton Eshleman in college. Jack the supermarxist street poet handing out retro-futurist poem-paintings at large antiwar gatherings came later, tho not that much later, any that’s the persona I suspect most readers know him as today. Of the three Latin American poets listed above, the one whose writing I can genuinely say I’ve always liked is Ernesto Cardenal, a writer sufficiently undoctrinaire as to translate Ezra Pound, that old lefty, into Spanish. In fact, if I recall right, some of the very first poetry I ever tried to make out en español were Cardenal’s renderings of The Cantos in El Corno Emplumado, circa 1967 or ’68.

 

But the focus of my own politics was never honed in on solidarity with third-world nationalist movements, as such. There was (still is) far too much to do at home, plus, as so many of those movements have come to demonstrate over the decades, (a) Marx was right, not Stalin, & that the idea of socialism in one country is not do-able, and (b) that if your movement is put under extraordinary & sustained external political & military pressure – the strategy of “containment” that can be traced back to Woodrow Wilson’s reaction to the overthrow of Czarist Russia – the forces in a society that necessarily come to political power will be the most military & brutal, whatever the optimism & well-meaning of the movement’s political leaders. The result – not an accident – was always that “actually existing” socialism looked a lot worse than the textbooks. That was an observation that, in the early 1970s, took me into the work of Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, the Frankfurt School & western Marxism generally. I try to imagine Adorno reading Roque Dalton. Even more, I try to remember just how Dalton died, executed as a traitor by the military arm of an organization he had helped to found, the sort of incestuous political paranoia that is a predictable consequence of the conditions of a relatively small group of people having to confront the military strength of the U.S. and its client regimes over any extended period. Not unlike Ho Chi Minh executing the Trotskyists in Vietnam.

 

I’ve always been amazed at a left that is not willing to be critical of movements that let themselves get backed into a corner & then behave lethally to one another. Similarly, the logic behind the anti-offshoring campaigns today strike me as the most thinly veiled xenophobia conceivable – essentially arguing that since the US absorbs a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth, it should continue to do so forever, rather than actually address what it would take to put together a genuinely global coalition of wage slaves, the only sort of labor movement that could ever avoid being sliced & diced at will by the divide-&-conquer machinations of capital. You call that The Left? It’s enough to make anyone who has ever read a history book cry.

 

So I turned instead to the latest volume by my favorite revolutionary poet in search of solace. This is the man who, in a review in Monthly Review decades ago, first called my attention to the swamp formalism of the late great Frank Stanford. But also a poet who, back when he was in college, was the lead singer & lyricist for a blues-rock band in Queens called The Bankers. The line “silverfish morning, bedbug night” still runs through my backbrain, tho I’ve long since given him my only copy of The Bankers one LP, a demo disc. Here is the poem “Whale Song”:

 

You just don’t now

How hard it is

To be uncivilized

 

You think that everyone you eat

Deserves to be eaten

 

                                            Lunch for me

Means someone ain’t coming home

 

So what

If breakfast might have been

The tuna that found a cure for cancer?

 

Damn sure was tasty!

 

Lorenzo Thomas – and you figured out this was a lead-up to me telling you how great Lorenzo Thomas is a few paragraphs ago, didn’t you? – Lorenzo Thomas is the kind of poet who writes a text just this simple that manages to borrow and allude not only from the New York School poetry of his youth, but Jack Spicer (that whole second stanza is an elegant little homage) & the projectivists (both Paul Blackburn & Robert Creeley figured in that final “So what”). Layers & layers here, and yet utterly straightforward. If this was the first poem you ever read, it would not hurt to not recognize all these other domains of richness that Thomas handles with almost preternatural ease. Note that the poem exhibits politics alright, but also the angle at which this exhibition is balanced.

 

Not every poem Lorenzo Thomas writes works as effortlessly or as well as this one, but virtually all of them try to do at least this much & often when I find some stanzas that strike me, say, as excessively sentimental (the final movement, for example, in “Journey of 1,000 Li”), it’s usually out of an excess of aesthetic ambition on Thomas’ part, he so wants to do it all as a writer that all the failures are themselves noble.  

 

Dancing on Main Street from Coffee House Press is Thomas’ latest book & it’s as full of mysteries & glories as his earlier works – this is not somebody who has an impulse to let up even in the slightest. A Panamanian born poet who grew up in New York, served in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam, & who has lived for years in Houston, Thomas is as alive as any poet I know to not just the presence of ambiguity & irony, but to their political value as well. So the answer to the question as to my “thoughts on revolutionary poetry,” is that, when it’s well written, I like it just fine.